


Snow Dunes

by doublejoint



Series: peachtober 2020 [19]
Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Pre-Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:00:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27111571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doublejoint/pseuds/doublejoint
Summary: On Hoth, time is in plentiful supply.
Series: peachtober 2020 [19]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1953295





	Snow Dunes

**Author's Note:**

> #peachtober day 19: Cool
> 
> sort of a companion to ["the motion of the future"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27088720)
> 
> Mentions of canonical character death

There’s not time to think at all before they arrive on Hoth, but when they do arrive there’s nothing but time. They’re still on high alert, still going out on patrols and scraping together information and rearranging it all (though that part’s mostly the higher-ups), still setting things up, but in ways that can easily be taken down, just in case. 

But the case hasn’t yet come. The Empire hasn’t yet found them. They fall into a routine, the first Luke’s really had since before all of this, when he was back home on Tatooine, and that already feels like decades ago. He’s busy with work and trying to train himself as a Jedi, but he’s got time before he falls asleep, time when he ends up eating by himself in the mess hall every so often, time spacing out on patrol before he snaps himself out of it.

And there’s also time, when he finds himself with someone--Han or Chewie or Wedge or Dak, but usually Leia--and they don’t talk, but their minds fall on the people and the things they’ve lost. They’ve been ripped from the past, so suddenly into the future, and without warning, just a violent shove, but they’re falling somewhat gracefully. Luke’s craning his neck to try and look back while he can still see, while he can still recall Aunt Beru’s face, Uncle Owen’s voice, their hands on his teaching him how to work the farm equipment, Aunt Beru’s stories about his grandmother. The food in the mess hall isn’t very appetizing most of the time, but it’s there and plentiful, and sometimes the smell of it makes Luke think of the times Uncle Owen came back from the market with some really good meat, and they’d had it with a side of the blue milk cheese Aunt Beru always saved for special occasions. But what can he say about this, his existence as a farm boy? Everyone’s got folks back home; everyone swears their family made the best pot roast or cheese or homemade moonshine. 

“Tell me about them,” Leia says, though, and Luke does.

He talks about the moons over Tatooine and the stories his aunt and uncle used to tell him, not like the whimsical fairy tales Leia knew, but about their childhoods, their parents’ childhoods, about Luke’s grandparents, Uncle Owen’s father and Luke’s father’s mother, marrying in front of the house when his uncle and aunt were teenagers, and how the year after that they’d been blessed with double the rain. 

(“Superstition,” Uncle Owen had always said.

“They believed it,” Aunt Beru had always retorted, her smile softening at his uncle.)

And Leia, too, after a lot more persuasion, tells about her parents, and about Alderaan, the mountains and the lakes and the palace, the food and the people and the tradition, and Luke does his best to store all the knowledge in his head, because Aunt Beru had always said that people and things live on as long as someone can tell their story.

* * *

Luke wakes up cold every morning, even after he starts sleeping in his jacket, with the extra blanket from the  _ Falcon _ (after Chewie practically forces it on him, like he can tell from the way Luke looks), with his hat. He drinks cup after cup of hot water, but the cold still seeps into his skin no matter how fast he drinks it. Space is cold, colder than Luke is used to, but this is something new.

Maybe, he thinks, he’ll be assigned to a volcano planet next, and then he’ll be sorry for hating this so much, but a volcano actually sounds pretty good right now. He knows how to deal with the heat, anyway. He’d take that over having to keep half his mind occupied at all times worrying about frostbite. 

“The Jedi wouldn’t complain about being cold, right?” he asks Senator Mothma.

“Depends on the Jedi,” she says. “General Kenobi wouldn’t, in front of other people.”

(It’s hard to reconcile the Ben he knew--barely knew--with the person all the older senators knew, charming and witty and a model citizen and tactician. He’d never had a reason to get to know the old man, but if he had? Or if he had, despite that--would Old Ben have shown him that side of him?)

Luke swallows his complaints, though, chokes them back with another canister full of hot water, and goes out on patrol.

The snow is cold and wet, more moisture fitting in his hand than he’d generate in a week back home, but if he squints and wears tinted goggles, it looks enough like the sand that it feels a little more like home. The rolling hills of snow are sand dunes, the grey and white clouds overhead a distant sandstorm. But the sand never arrives; the blowing snow doesn’t sting his face the same way. The cold wind is a different kind of harsh.

* * *

Luke’s on a double-shift watch, all day, the only excitement from when he heads back to the base for lunch and switches out his shivering tauntaun to a new one, a little more easily-startled but fresh from a nap. He barely has time to catch up with anyone, barely has time to start feeling his cheeks again before he heads back out into the snowdrifts. The sky is half-clear today, the sun brightly silhouetted in the clouds. 

The wind is harsh. The sun sets early, as it always does, but earlier still today, as the planet rotates closer, this face of it angled away from the star. Luke hunches his shoulders, and, after one last sweep of the area, guides his tauntaun back. That night, he spends no time lying awake and thinking about other places, or even this place, or anything in particular; he’s too tired to stay awake long enough to arrange himself comfortably. It’s been a long day full of waiting and thinking, and of letting the cold sink into him like an old bolt sinking into the blowing sand back on Tatooine, but he’s home now.


End file.
